Sexual Violence in Mali Casts Shadow Over Peace Efforts

Malian men take part in a meeting of residents from Northern Mali, in Bamako on April 4, 2012. The placard reads "No to rape". Photographer: Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty Images

Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Rebels who had conquered northern
Mali offered to pay the equivalent of $14 for a 13-year-old
girl. When her family said no, they took her anyway.

A week later, she died in captivity, after she was
repeatedly raped by a group of armed men.

That incident in April is one of hundreds of documented
cases compiled by the United Nations in the past year that shed
light on the sexual violence unleashed by insurgents -- mostly
Touareg separatists rather than al-Qaeda-linked Islamists --
during their occupation of a sparsely populated and inhospitable
Mali region the size of Texas.

Nine months later, the rebels have melted away into the
desert as French intervention troops advance. For the women of
the farming and cattle-herding communities, the prospect is that
yet another peace deal will ignore the record of rape used as a
weapon of war.

“The question of sexual violence is not treated as an
urgent question, unfortunately,” Hannah Armstrong, an analyst
on security in West Africa. The same Touareg fighters now
clamoring for negotiations “carried out raid-style attacks
during which animals were stolen, slave-caste women raped
repeatedly,” she said in an interview in Bamako, the Malian
capital.

A total of 211 cases of sexual violence -- including gang
rape, sexual slavery, forced marriages and torture -- were
committed during house-to-house operations or at checkpoints
during 2012, according to the Office of the UN Special
Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict.

Rape, Looting

The cases, which have not been made public, were verified
over the course of a two-week fact-finding mission in November,
when a UN official met in person with witnesses and survivors of
sexual assault. Their names were withheld out of concern for
their safety as the perpetrators still held the affected areas.

Only a handful of peace agreements address such crimes. The
likelihood is that in Mali conflict-related sexual violence will
be brushed aside, as has happened in Libya since the fighting
that toppled and killed dictator Muammar Qaddafi.

A further complication is that those held responsible for
the worst abuses against women are young Touareg men of Malian
origin who rescinded their claims of independence and are now
making peace overtures. The separatist rebel group that
unleashed the chaos, the National Movement for the Liberation of
Azawad, known by its French acronym MNLA, lost control over its
militants soon after it occupied the north and its fighters were
seen attacking their own people.

Old Patterns

During the rebellion, traditional patterns of subjugation
reemerged with most of the reported abuses occurring after the
armed groups seized Gao on March 31 and a day later when they
took the fabled capital of the North, Timbuktu.

A 36-year-old woman in Gao was raped in her home by two
light-skinned, turban-wearing men speaking Tamacheq, the
language spoken by Touareg, according to an account told to UN
officials. They broke into her house to demand money and gold
ornaments and came in a Toyota Hilux pickup truck flying a
yellow, black, red and green flag used by MNLA.

A nomadic people who have roamed the sand dunes of the
Sahara for millennia, the Touareg have been romanticized as the
“blue men of the desert” for their indigo-dyed cotton robes.
In their quest to gain independence for northern Mali, they
joined forces with extremist groups such as Ansar Dine, led by a
dissident Touareg commander turned radical Islamist, only to be
pushed aside later.

French Warning

The MNLA is now courting the Malian authorities and
offering to support the French military push.

“From our point of view, the French army should not get
involved with them and we’ve cautioned them against
collaborating,” the UN director of Human Rights Watch, Philippe
Bolopion, said in a Jan. 28 telephone interview while on a
mission in Mali to report on human-rights abuses.

Still, the MNLA’s exclusion from the negotiating table may
hobble efforts to find a long-term solution for itinerant tribes
that have staged numerous uprisings amid complaints that their
region was ignored by the central government.

“There should be some kind of acknowledgment of the abuses
the MNLA committed as that would go some way to introducing the
notion that they have a credible political leadership,” said
Armstrong, a specialist in the Sahel region, a semi-arid strip
of land that spans Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger
and Nigeria.

The assaults on women in northern Mali also reveal remnants
of a culture of slavery, nominally abolished in 1960 when the
country gained its independence from France.

Slavery Traditions

The acquisition of livestock and women through raids are
part of the traditional Touareg style of warfare, while
subjugation of people seen as low-caste is still considered
acceptable among some families, according to Temedt, a Malian
human-rights group that conducts anti-slavery advocacy.

Women and girls of the darker-skinned Bella community,
whose people have historically been considered as slaves of the
Touaregs, were in particular targeted by Ansar Dine and the
Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa, a radical Islamist
group that has many Touareg fighters in its ranks, according to
UN experts who visited Mali during the turmoil and asked to not
be identified because they are not authorized to speak publicly.

“Witnesses and victims from the Bella slave caste told me
attackers and looters were Touaregs, not Islamists,” Armstrong
said.

Parents were threatened to get then to hand over their
daughters for marriage to members of these groups, which
invariably led to rape, sexual enslavement and sometimes death,
the UN experts said

Forced Marriage

In one incident, a 15-year-old girl was forced into
marriage to Abdul Haqim, a military commander for the Movement
for Unity and Jihad in West Africa. Repeatedly raped for months
by fighters in the militia base, she was released when she
became pregnant, according to the UN investigators.

In Mali, based on cases reported by displaced survivors of
sexual violence, rebels conducted “requisitions,” or the
abduction of women and girls, from a district to spend the night
in their camps. Each night a different district would be
required to provide a number of women and girls to the rebels.
This, UN officials say, would suggest it was a tactic to
subjugate local populations that was condoned by top commanders.

“Conflict-related sexual violence is not specific to any
era, culture or continent,” according to a 54-page guidebook
for mediators produced last year by the UN. But it is “arguably
more powerful and less expensive than a gun.”

Systematic Violence

In the case of the conflict in Democratic Republic of
Congo, sexual attacks provoke displacement to increase
aggressors’ access to resources. Amid the warfare during the
breakup of former Yugoslavia, such acts disrupted reproduction
among targeted ethnic groups, interfering with population
growth.

“Women in war-torn societies can face specific and
devastating forms of sexual violence, which are sometimes
deployed systematically to achieve military or political
objectives,” according to UN Women, the UN office for gender
equality and the empowerment of women.

While it’s undisputed that rape has been used in war since
the earliest armies to instill fear and create ethnic divisions
-- and continues in war zones such as Syria -- the view that
sexual violence in conflicts is on the rise has been challenged.

A Human Security Report released in October by Canadian
researchers said there was a “distortion of evidence” by aid
agencies and the UN, which base their assertions on the “small
number of countries afflicted by extreme levels of sexual
violence.”

‘Mainstream Narrative’

The “mainstream narrative associated with this advocacy
exaggerates the prevalence of conflict-related rape,” according
to the 132-page report by researchers affiliated with Simon
Fraser University in Vancouver.

The UN Secretary-General’s office responded that accurate
data collection is difficult and that the phenomenon leaves
women afraid of being banished by their communities or facing
reprisals in cultures where victims are urged to keep quiet.

One issue is the scarcity of women in mediation and
monitoring teams. It would be easier to get female victims to
open up to women than men in places where there is great gender
disparity and rape carries a social stigma. Fewer than 3 percent
of signatories to peace agreements are women, according to a UN
Women report on the participation of women in peace processes.

Among the internal refugees in the capital, Bamako, some
women also tell stories of rape and abuse, Violet Diallo, a
British social worker, said in an interview.

“In the north, especially, it’s taboo to discuss anything
that relates to sex.” said Diallo, who helps displaced women in
Bamako. “What we hear is probably only the tip of the
iceberg.”